Our thanks go to all
those who took on our project as if it were their own, helping us to
collect data and take photos of places we wanted to describe.

We would also like
to thank the many people who did not let us give up. Thanks to you,
High Treason exists as a
narrative and as testimony to many years of essential discovery.

Eternal thanks to
all of you.

The authors

PREFACE

Until
the beginning of the ’80s, Venezuelans experienced life as one long
celebration where the only controversy was whether Caracas or
Magallanes would win the baseball league.

However, in 1981,
the illusory and paternalistic effect of the oil dollars began to
fade away. As oil prices dropped, administrative corruption surfaced
as well as marked social economic contrast, which had been brewing
since the first government of Carlos Andrés Pérez (1974-1979).

In 1989, Venezuelan
people showed their contempt for the rise in the cost of public
transport in the “Caracazo,” perhaps the most violent protest
ever in Venezuelan history, which resulted in three thousand deaths
and the looting of dozens of small businesses. Three years later, two
successive coup attempts marked the end of Venezuela’s political
stability that up to that point had been the envy of other countries
in the region.

However, even when
the distance between social classes became more and more pronounced,
there was no imaginary collective demanding the total rejection and
consequent annihilation of the country’s powerful elite.

Without exception,
the democratic governments that came to power after the fall of
dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez in 1958 were characterized by their
extraordinary ability to incorporate leaders from all echelons of
society into their ranks. It was this efficiency which enabled the
heterogeneous governing groups to mediate between the interests of
the big capitalists, their own ambitions of power, and the interests
of the more vulnerable of Venezuela’s citizens, who lived off
promises to eradicate hardship which never came to fruition.

In this way, the
patrimonial structure of the governments, although threatened by the
dashed hopes of the Venezuelan people, was able to keep the country
united even throughout the ’90s. Somehow,
the celebration continued.

In 1998, Hugo
Chávez—leader of the first coup of 1992—suddenly emerged as a
political figure and was elected president after defeating both of
Venezuela’s main political parties: Acción
Democrática and COPEI. Such a triumph was due in large
measure to his radical and belligerent speech, which spoke of the
need to emancipate the masses from their exploiters. This soon
triggered a profound and violently irrational polarization within
Venezuelan society.

Those who shared the
ideology of Chávez raised their voices to make demands while blaming
their hardships on all those who remained skeptical of the
President’s revolutionary political ideology. The skeptics in turn
could foresee the isolation that awaited them if they did not
publicly side with the Chavistas, even at the expense of their
deepest convictions.

Many events took
place in this climate of ideological tension but, without doubt, the
first of its kind was the Vargas tragedy, which occurred at the same
time as the constitutional referendum that eroded the country’s
democratic foundation. This incident was the decisive factor in
leading those who had voted for Chávez into a deep tunnel of
disappointment.

In December 1999,
about fifty thousand people died following mudslides in the coastal
mountains of La Guaira, in the state of Vargas. Although warnings had
been issued since December 10, instead of evacuating the danger zone,
Chávez’s government used the media to exhort citizens to vote in
the referendum that was set for December 15, just as the tragedy
occurred.

On this rainy
December day, ignoring the deaths caused by the mudslides and in
spite of a meager 45% turnout, Chávez won the right to reconstruct
what he insisted on calling “the dying Venezuelan constitution.”
The new law soon dissolved congress and transferred to the president
the powers and instruments necessary to develop his 21st
century revolutionary socialist plan.

After just a year in
government, Chávez began to face harsh criticism from the civil
opposition, and this grew in strength over the following two years.
Amid these growing tensions, Venezuelans turned out en masse to
demonstrate in public against the government. Social polarization
became much more pronounced and provoked acts of violence.

The first of these
was the Puente Llaguno tragedy. On April 11 2002, several of those
opposed to the regime died during a demonstration, when Chávez
supporters opened fire on the protesters. The next day there followed
a failed coup against Chávez. After yielding to public pressure to
step down, Chávez returned to the presidency three days later thanks
to the support of a considerable proportion of the Venezuelan
populace and the failed vision of his political opponents.

With Chávez in
power again, tensions continued to mount until they exploded in the
Altamira square tragedy. At the end of 2002, and after several weeks
of an opposition group gathering in the same square to demonstrate
peacefully, Joao De Gouveia, a follower of Chávez, opened fire on
the demonstrators, killing three people. The
celebration had surely ended in Venezuela.

Since 2003, due to
the extreme increase in oil prices, history has repeated itself and
the illusion of oil money has helped Chávez to regain his
popularity, consolidate power, and radicalize his socialist policies
even more, provoking violent demonstrations that have led to a number
of tragedies over the years, and which continue into the present.

Supporters of Chávez
claim that his government is fairer than those that have gone before
because he serves those who were neglected by previous
administrations, and that Chávez has sought to tackle poverty,
illiteracy, and the inequities of the healthcare system.

On the other hand,
his opponents argue that poverty continues to increase while Chávez
uses the nation’s assets to develop his political agenda overseas
and to strengthen his position within the country through a new
social class, the “Chavistas.” In the same way that many people
became rich by working the ruling parties in previous decades, those
who now support Chávez accrue more wealth and power with each day of
his tenure.

With the new
bureaucracy, Chávez has created a centralist system that has eroded
individual initiative and has acquired privately held assets, despite
the Venezuelans rejecting this approach in a referendum called by
Chávez himself on December 2, 2007.

In this atmosphere,
those who oppose him perceive not only their own personal fragility
in the new regime, but also the violent and anti-constitutional
nature of his government administration, in which the opposition
continuously accuses Chávez of participating in terrorist activity
and inability to curb the never-ending crime which plagues the
country. Caracas, a city with 7 million inhabitants, is one of the
most violent cities in the world today.

The quality of life
has fallen to such a degree that Venezuela—a country that until
1982 had traditionally welcome immigration—has lost at least 1.5
million Venezuelans, mostly professionals who have now settled in the
USA and Europe since Chávez took power. To date, no information is
available on the number of illegal emigrants, so this figure could be
higher.

The consequences of
the so-called Chávez revolution cannot be completely measured yet.
However, there is no doubt that this regime has changed Venezuela
dramatically, not only politically and economically, but also
psychologically. Venezuela is now a deeply divided nation, and the
psychological fault lines are so enormous they threaten the sense of
nationhood that has existed in the country since Independence.

While one sector of
society keeps hoping for and imagining a better future, others
express resignation and bitterness in the face of an onslaught of
violence and intolerance.

The novel begins
during the festive climate of 1998 and ends in 2007. Although the
characters are fictitious, almost all the situations they are
involved in belong to Venezuela’s recent history, to its drastic
changes and the emotions borne from these changes.

Introduction(2007)

September
10, 2007

Newsflash!
A bomb exploded this morning at the headquarters of Banco del Tesoro
in Porlamar where President Chávez was attending the bank’s
opening ceremony. Several people were injured, including a camera
operator from the national Venezuelan television channel who was
adjusting the spotlights close to where the bomb went off.

The
person responsible for the attack was shot dead after police located
him in Bella Vista. The man in question, 38-year old Maikel Salgado,
worked for the government on Margarita Island. It’s believed that
Salgado acted alone using a defective homemade bomb that failed to
fully detonate. Officials and agents who worked with Salgado have
confirmed that he had experience with explosives.

Through television
and radio, the first report of the incident reached homes around the
country. It also reached market places and supermarkets, cafes and
bars, stores and stands, offices, factories, beaches, mountains, and
plains. The news even travelled to the jungle, and after being edited
and translated, it was transmitted to homes in other countries. These
reports sent out by satellite lacked, however, the sense of urgency
that could be heard in the voice of the Caracas newscaster, who
seemed to know how extremely powerful the event made him sound as he
read out the news with a mixture of arrogance and mistrust.

His words took all
of Venezuela by surprise, from Caracas to La Guajira in the west, to
Santa Elena de Uairen in the south and eastwards to Curiapo. However,
the newscaster had no idea of the effects of the attack or whether
any of the nation’s twenty-eight million inhabitants felt anger or
fear, sadness or joy. You never know how people are going to react
until they react, he thought.

It was four in the
morning at the police headquarters in Porlamar, Margarita Island. A
police officer was looking for the latest baseball results when he
decided to switch on the radio. He was alone at that moment, with the
newspaper spread out on the lone rickety desk in the room. Hearing a
local folk song playing on the dilapidated radio, he started humming
along, drumming the dirty nails of his left hand on the porous wood.

Two electric bulbs
dangling more than a foot from the ceiling on peeled wires cast a
welcome light on the police officer, who sat with his ample belly
protruding from his unbuttoned trousers as he leafed through the
newspaper in search of the boxing news.

Hanging high on the
wall behind him, a picture of the national hero Simón Bolívar,
prisoner of old writings and in something of a trance, contemplated
the almost empty room and its yellow walls. However, Bolívar could
not smell the odor of rancid butter that emanated from these walls,
nor could he see, due to the slight angle of his head, the passage
where three cells joined.

The three small
cells with rusty bars and no more ventilation than the little they
shared with the passage were almost entirely cast in shadow. Like the
other two, the darkest compartment farthest away from the police
officer was covered in a layer of grime consisting of urine, vomit,
and dried blood. Amid this pile of filth, that had been accumulating
since time began, lay Rodrigo, more disgusted with himself than with
what lay around him.

The police officer’s
radio began to blare out the news of the day. It was one of those
radios that looked like an unbreakable toy. Out of the yellow box
rose an antenna, bent in several places by wear and tear. Rodrigo
tried to listen to the broadcast but due to the numbness of his
brain, the pitiful sound quality of the radio, and the distance that
separated him from the guard, he could hardly hear a thing. However,
when he made out Maikel’s name, a shudder ran through his body and
he began to vomit, leaving on the pestilent floor a fresh record of
his stay in the cell.

When the nausea had
passed, he sat with his legs bent, leaning his elbows on them to
support his head with both hands. The radio repeated the news like a
scratched record and Rodrigo was finally able to catch what they were
saying about Maikel and Chávez. Inert and trembling, he tensed his
face muscles before finally giving way to a broken, dry sob.

When he was able to
compose himself, he heard the buzzing of a fly and looked at the
ground, searching for it in the puddle of fresh vomit. The fragile
rays of light coming into the cell from the weak bulb in the passage
helped him to find it, fluorescent green and scrutinizing the feast
that lay before it. Restless and greedy, it began to fly around the
room, trying to land on Rodrigo’s head and chest. That was when he
realized that at some point during the previous night he had been
sick down the front of his t-shirt. Another more prolonged fit of
inconsolable crying immediately followed.

The fly ended up
making do with the vomit on the floor and did not bother him again.
Trying to ride out the fresh wave of nausea, Rodrigo stayed still,
letting the events that had led him to this Porlamar cell swirl
around his head like a swarm of vomit-hungry green flies.

Part
One.The Celebration(1988-1997)

CHAPTER
1

July
14, 1988

My
name is Rodrigo Fernandez and I’m a Spanish language and literature
teacher. My friends and neighbors usually call me affectionately but
mistakenly “Gallego,” due to my Spanish descent, thinking
everything that comes out of Spain must come from Galicia.

My father Emiliano
was born in Asturias, where my mother also grew up, although she and
her family are from Navarre. They met in Caracas and got married when
he was just a bricklayer, and she a seamstress in a children’s
clothing factory. He soon became a master builder and she left the
factory, but she continued to sew. Now, she works from home, making
dresses for the elegant and not-so-elegant ladies in the east of
Caracas. I also have a younger sister, Raquel.

At the time I’m
telling you about, my adolescence, we lived in an apartment which
looked out over Francisco de Miranda avenue, in a neighborhood called
Bello Campo, which although it belongs to the wealthier east, is an
area mainly inhabited by the middle class, a species now extinct in
Venezuela.

Before that, we
lived in La Candelaria, a neighborhood notable for nothing apart from
the concentration of Spanish and Portuguese immigrants there. The
people are versatile, noisy, and unpredictable. Our family upped and
left for the east when a professional motorcycle racer who lived in
our neighborhood decided to practice in our block and began to
serenade us with revving engines and exhaust fumes every ten minutes
in the early hours of the morning.

Papa would say that
he wanted to flee to the middle of nowhere, giving the impression
that he would have been happy if he could have moved to the
easternmost edge of the city. Here amid the deep vegetation of the
coastal mountain range he would still be able to enjoy the simplicity
of the small villages, which at that time bordered on Caracas without
wanting to belong to the city. Nevertheless, due to his work and
above all the job of my mother, who did not drive and so could not
get to her customers’ houses, we had to make do with Bello Campo.

My sister and I were
brought up within the strictest Iberian conventions: all privileges
were for me, the prince, and all the household chores (cooking,
cleaning, washing, and ironing) for my poor sister, whose only fault
was having been born a girl. As if that was not bad enough, from the
time of her eighteenth birthday, Raquel was a victim of my mother’s
sage advice about getting married, something a woman should do while
young and preferably to a Spaniard with whom she could bear happy,
healthy children. “But how can I do that?” my sister would
wonder, when our father had converted our apartment into an
inaccessible fortress which deterred those brave enough to imagine my
old man as father-in-law.

I often felt sorry
for my sister, for her well-kept virginity and the future that my
mother had mapped out for her. However, my pity was not of a militant
kind, like Don Quixote’s, because I knew from a very early age that
despite her tenderness, my mother was a like a windmill, a force to
be reckoned with and I did not feel like playing the hero in a story
where the only possible outcome was defeat.

I remember that
Thursday when I mentioned the matter to Manuel and Alfredo. We were
at the beach having a beer, and I decided to use the word “dichotomy”
instead of “contradiction” to explain to them my parents’
behavior.

“Dichotomy? What
the hell is that? Did you hear, Manuel? A typical word the
Gallego pulls out of his sleeve to sound intelligent, ha ha ha!”

With his teasing,
Alfredo could conceal the kind intentions that always motivated him
when he was faced with my worries.

“Just because I
like reading, unlike others I could mention. Sorry, but for a second
there I forgot that you wouldn’t know the meaning of the word. Let
me explain: reading is basically what you do with porn, except I look
at the words”

“What, Rodrigo? Do
the words turn you on?” Alfredo and I laughed at Manuel, who
for a few seconds shot me an astonished look as if he was taking me
seriously.

That is how it
always was. We enjoyed going to the beach, spending hours talking
until the afternoon chill took us by surprise, encouraging us to head
back to Caracas.

After we had
graduated from high school and were waiting to start university, we
had a simple routine based on never-ending drinking and the same old
jokes, which, though they were mostly harmless, could sometimes be
darkly humorous and quite caustic. Anyone who saw us engrossed in
this activity would think that we hated each other, when really we
were just three supposedly virile young guys, trying to express the
immense fondness that kept us together.

We first met at the
Don Bosco School in Altamira. Although in those days, public
education was not bad in Caracas, my parents had agreed to send me to
a Catholic school so that with one lucky shot, Mom could fulfill her
Christian duty to educate her son as God required and at the same get
a free rein from my father to entertain one of his favorite beliefs:
it is not what you know in Venezuela, but who you know that counts.

My father was so
satisfied with this agreement that he forgot the ten-hour days he
spent on building sites, and my mother forgot the few back-breaking
hours she spent sewing. For them the sacrifice was worthwhile. They
did not mind working longer hours because they believed that life
should be hard—that was what life was for. They had always lived in
Venezuela with this belief, differentiating themselves from most
native Venezuelans, who treated life like a perpetual party.

My father enjoyed
giving me long lectures on what he viewed as the pathological
weaknesses of these people. He proclaimed for example that our
indigenous people had never had to work like Europeans. He imagined
them before the conquest, playing with themselves in the jungle, with
mangos, which they would eat later, falling on their heads.

My father’s
argument was usually extensive and occasionally metaphysical, digging
deep into the country’s history, and usually concluded with the
assertion that the last straw was Venezuela’s new oil. Wealth had
weakened the Venezuelan character, my father argued, as nothing good
comes from an easy life. Without the immigrants from Spain, Italy,
and Portugal who began arriving at La Guaira port at the beginning of
the fifties, Venezuela would have been a jungle full of onanists of
no great consequence.

The Thursday of the
aforementioned conversation about dichotomy, while I was settling
into bed with a belly full of beer, Papa burst into my room. I saw in
his eyes that he was furious about my little alcohol-fuelled vacation
to the beach, and without hesitation, he told me he was not putting
up with layabouts in his house. I should get a job until university
classes began.

He tried to force me
into selling insurance for a friend of his who was an agent, but
being a son of my country like none other, I had a better idea.
During his exhausting litany and shower of saliva, I thought I would
get myself a job more suited to a true Venezuelan.

CHAPTER
2

July
20, 1988

Three
religions coexist in Venezuela: Catholicism, baseball, and beer. The
latter worships one god alone, like the Catholic religion, or should
I say one goddess, La Polar, which dominates 95% of the
unsophisticated Venezuelan market. However, although its followers
claim that Polar is the only real beer, it’s a plural concept known
by many names: “the Little Pot,” “Blondie,” and “the Bear”
among others.

The night that my
father and I discussed my work situation, I called Alfredo to tell
him about our discussion, and ask for his advice. He recommended that
I contact his cousin, a successful PR agent who employed young lads
like me who had just graduated from school, and who were eager to
find easy, well-paid work.

Alfredo’s cousin’s
ambitious campaign strove to change the beer culture of the
Venezuelans drastically, in its effort to overthrow the dominance of
Polar forever. As part of this strategy, dozens of youngsters
somewhat lacking in the sense department were sent to the restaurants
and bars of Caracas with some cash. Their mission was to give the
proprietor five hundred bolivars each time they offered their
customers the beer in the campaign. Whenever for some reason the
proprietors ignored their instructions, our graduates would give them
a lecture and, as an afterthought, a ballpoint pen as a souvenir of
the money they could have earned.

Therefore, at the
age of 18, my first job consisted of going to bars with the mission
of spying on proprietors, drinking a few free Polars, giving a sermon
or two, and doling out money.

Unfortunately, the
great strategy hatched by Giovanni, Alfredo’s aforementioned
cousin, went unnoticed. At that time, the people of Caracas were more
worried about the growing crime wave. Each weekend, an average of
twenty people lost their lives. The causes were different and at
times absurd. How can you kill somebody to steal their shoes for
example? That is how it was. Insecurity seemed to have reached its
peak, and from there things could only get better.

We were wrong
however. Only a few weeks ago, my mother was reminiscing about “those
glorious days” as she called them, sighing with immense nostalgia,
of finding yourself shoeless and bruised in the middle of Francisco
Solano avenue, because after Chávez became president, the weekly
number of deaths began to multiply in a remarkable way.

With the body count
growing daily, some wary citizens began to wonder if we were secretly
or unconsciously competing with the Iraq war. If so, the statistics
showed that we had nothing to fear—we were way out in front.
Caracas had the second highest instance of death from violence in the
world; double that of Baghdad, a city in a state of war.2

Several days after
the argument with Papa, and several Polars later, I was walking
through the center of Caracas, happily thinking about how I had
already been in my nice new spy job for a week when a short guy with
a scarred face approached me and said:

“Don’t stop, you
rich piece of shit, just carry on walking. When I say so, give me
your money. You do anything, motherfucker, I’m going to kill you.”

Out of the corner of
my eye, I noticed that the thug was hiding his hands in his nylon
jacket. Thinking that he was taking out a knife, I decided to push
him and run for it.

“He has a knife!
He has a knife!” I yelled at the top of my voice. As I was running,
I knew, just as gazelles do, that you don’t need eyes to see you’re
defeated, because without looking, I knew he was going to catch me.

The only thing I
remember is the coldness that penetrated the back of my ribs, and the
immense pain that began to paralyze me while I tried not to fall
over. That day I decided that my father was talking sense, and that
hard work was my destiny. The last few strides of the chase became my
first steps to reality.

CHAPTER
3

July
21, 1988

I
woke up in an extremely clean and well-lit single room of a private
medical center, and saw my mother sitting on one of the two chairs
for visitors by the large window. On the small table between the two
chairs was a vase of white lilies. For an instant, I focused on them,
trying to decide whether they were real or plastic, but my vision was
blurred. I tried to move but the pain in my ribs paralyzed me. Since
I was feeling cold, the first sound that came out of my mouth was a
mumbled request for a blanket.

“Darling, what a
scare you gave us! How are you feeling, honey?” asked my mother
closing her Hola! magazine, to
which she had always been addicted. She leaned over to attend to me.

I repeated that I
was cold but as she still did not seem to understand, I decided to
change the message. Gathering all the energy in my belly, I managed
to emit a kind of gurgle that sounded something like “water.”

“Rodrigo, how can
you ask for water when you haven’t eaten for twenty-four hours?!
Look at you; you’re like a scarecrow, my poor dear! Here’s some
fruit salad I made for you last night when I couldn’t sleep. I also
made you some squid with onions that you’re having as soon as you
come home… Let’s see, let’s give our little boy a bit of
pineapple and orange so that he gets well and strong again!”

I opened my mouth
with the sole purpose of rejecting her offer and a spoonful of
chopped fruit was rammed into my mouth, making me shiver. Resigned to
my mother’s stubborn insistence, I had no choice but to endure the
torture.

“You were lucky,
kid,” a doctor who had just entered the room announced in an
incredibly powerful voice. “The stab only fractured a rib. We’re
going to keep you in for observation for a couple of days. Then if
everything is ok, you can go home on Friday.”

When I saw him, I
forgot all my suffering, as the doctor was so amazingly short that he
had to look up to see my mother, who was small herself and walked
with a stoop due to the sewing. He checked my wound, and since the
hospital bed was higher than usual, he looked like a greyhound busily
sniffing out a bone it had lost the night before.

Removing his face
from my shoulder, he shot over to the door at the speed of light,
which astonished me as much as his size and similarly distracted me
from my pain. He seemed to me a diminutive Hermes, the Greek god with
winged feet.

Before leaving, he
stopped dead and, without noticing the touching devotion with which
my mother attended to me, said to her in a brusque voice that
resonated like heavenly thunder:

“Ma’am, please
don’t hassle the boy too much while he’s still feeling the
effects of the anesthesia. Give him a few sips of water.”

That same afternoon,
my room was transformed into something like a Spanish tavern. I was
on display like a leg of Serrano ham at the bar, bruised and being
ripped open again, this time psychologically although no less deeply,
as my school friends who came to see me joked and teased me about how
I looked. Taking advantage of the party atmosphere, the nurses, who
were almost all young, began to come in at random intervals on some
pretext or other: a juice, the thermometer, the drip, urine…
humiliated, I listened to my friends’ jokes, applauded by their
youthful paramedical audience.

“What happened,
Rodrigo? Did you stick your foot in your helmet?”

It was Vicente. He
was talking about that embarrassing episode in my short baseball
career when I was running to second base and my helmet fell off and
got wedged on my foot, forcing me to dive ridiculously to the ground.

I bore the sarcasm
like a hero, as I did the throbbing from my wound, which was getting
stronger and stronger, as if the anxiety that had gone in with the
knife was still inside, trapped by the stitches. At night, the pain
was unbearable, so the doctor prescribed me intravenous morphine,
which I could self-inject by pressing a trigger.

The nurse on shift,
much larger than the ones on day duty and with the face of a
sergeant, showed me how to use the lever that dispensed the
painkiller.

“When you feel
pain, press here, and if you need anything, press this other button
and I’ll come right away,” she said, pointing to the controls.

Ironically, I
concluded that in the field of medical services, you could get
anything you wanted by pulling a trigger, whether you had an
automatic prefilled syringe full of drugs in your hand like in my
case, or a pistol, like when we decided to spend Easter Week at the
beach near Cata Bay, where my father had rented a house.

My sister, around
six at the time, used to suffer quite severe asthma attacks. The
night before the trip, she had slept badly, but my father was not in
the least bit worried, being convinced that sea air cures everything.
Although it was quite late when we got to the beach, Raquel and I
went for a swim and chased each around on the sand for ages. Perhaps
because of the excitement and God knows what else, my sister had a
strong asthma attack. At midnight, Papa got us all in the car and in
ten minutes, we were at the local first aid clinic, run by the state.
It was nothing more than a small gloomy shed with a waiting room
furnished with old chairs. Not a soul was around.

Holding Raquel in
his arms, my father begged the male nurse to help each time he came
to tell us that the doctor was coming. Papa’s pleas and the rasping
breath of my sister mingled with thuds of domino pieces and roars of
laughter coming from the back of the hut.

After half an hour,
Raquel began to turn purple and my father, after giving her to my
mother, got up very slowly, went out of the clinic toward the car,
and came back in even more slowly, if that were possible, with hardly
a glance at us. The passageway, which led to the back of the hut
almost swallowed him up. After barely a minute, there was a deep
silence. We heard his voice, which was so hoarse we barely recognized
it.

“If the kid dies,
then you die too, you son of a bitch”

At that moment, the
doctor appeared in the waiting room followed by my father, who was
pointing a gun at him, his eyes looking bloodshot. The imposing
stature of the doctor contrasted with his young face, fearful and
dim-witted.

Until then, I did
not even know that my father owned a gun. I’ve never seen it since,
despite inventing excuses to stay at home alone and go through the
cupboards. And I’ve never seen that look on my father’s face,
darkened by hatred and despair, since that day.

CHAPTER
4

July
27, 1988

My
convalescence days were very quiet. Alfredo, Manuel and I kept
ourselves amused by hanging out at Manuel’s house or playing
dominoes. We knew that once classes started at university, our lives
would change forever, and even though we looked ahead thinking that
the future would bring good times, we were not in a rush to be
separated. Even if we could carry on meeting each other, the careers
that we had chosen would involve different rules and ambitions. So,
along with a sense of worry about this new world that we would be
inhabiting in a few weeks’ time, there was also a feeling of deep
nostalgia for the old world we were leaving behind.

We preferred meeting
at Manuel’s house because he had a pool, tennis court, and games
room where the previous owners had installed a great billiard table,
two dartboards, and a multi-functional table with roulette to boot.
Dazzled by the luxury, Alfredo and I, and sometimes even Manuel, who
couldn’t but have noticed our unceasing awe at the house’s
fixtures and fittings, all tried to make light of the great fortune
of the Sánchez family, who seemed to have amassed immense wealth in
the last few years.

“Shit, Rodrigo, I
can’t sleep,” joked Manuel only a few weeks after moving to his
new house. “I’m used to hearing shots, car brakes, and sirens and
now all I can hear is the frogs croaking.” And he was laughing
because the croaking of the frogs gave him the chance to show us his
incredible repertoire of onomatopoeic words, which made us think that
instead of sleeping, Manuel would happily spend the whole night
learning to imitate grasshoppers, birds, toads, and cats in heat,
just to impress us.

Before moving to the
mansion in upscale Las Lomas de Prados del Este, Manuel Sánchez
lived with his parents in Maripérez, a quite centrally located
neighborhood that had been built up in the seventies. The Sánchez
family apartment was comfortable, although rather basic, and was in
keeping with every other building that went up in Caracas during that
decade.

The families that
lived there were also similar. They were mostly young professionals
with small children and great aspirations, especially where climbing
the social ladder was concerned. Theirs had been the first Venezuelan
generation that had benefitted from the expansion of the
universities, and now they worked for national and international
corporations, for the government, or in one of the many industries
that, in those days, were turning Caracas into a real metropolis. Too
happy due to the oil bonanza, this burgeoning class did not realize
that they were dependent on jobs, fixed salaries, bonds and bonuses
that could all suddenly disappear if the country went into economic
decline.

Alternatively,
perhaps some, like Mr. and Mrs. Sánchez, felt that everything comes
to an end. Manuel’s mother was a lawyer and his father was an
accountant at Jeep Venezuela. When they married, he was a car
salesman, something he was probably born to do, as he was a genius at
convincing people to buy things they did not need. However, after a
few years Mrs. Sánchez thought her husband should build himself a
more solid career, and so he started studying at night to leave his
vocation behind.

In 1984, when Jaime
Lusinchi became president, Mrs. Sánchez, who in those days worked
for herself as a notary in a tiny office on Baralt avenue, landed an
important job with the county of Baruta. Four years later, Mr. and
Mrs. Sánchez moved to the mansion in Lomas de Prados del Este. In
addition to extraordinary luxuries, they also had a chauffeur and a
security guard, two new cars, three servants, and made many trips
abroad.

Their good fortune
disappeared when money was embezzled from Jeep and all heads turned
toward one of the bosses and Manuel’s father. Forced to retire, Mr.
Sánchez was never able to get a decent job again, and gradually and
discreetly began to fall to pieces, as he was an introverted man, or
at least, as Manuel would tell us, he had become that way over the
years.

I always thought
that the strange nature of Mr. Sánchez had a lot to do with his
wife. He always looked at her as if he was seeing her for the first
time, although not in a pleasant way, but rather with frightened and
sometimes terrified eyes, like someone lost in the forest who
suddenly sees a wolf. Thinking back now, I’m not sure whether the
real corrupt one was Mr. Sánchez, quiet and discreet, or his wife, a
plump woman who pretended to be sophisticated, but who would gossip
like a fishwife all the time, only taking a breath to crush the ice
in her Cuba Libre with her teeth. One of those afternoons as we were
sunbathing at the swimming pool, Mrs. Sánchez shouted to us:

“Manuel, Rodrigo,
Alfrredo, come over here a second and help me with this!”

“Jesus, my mom is
a pain in the ass. Turn a blind eye and maybe she’ll shut up.”

“Manuel! Boys!”
Her bothersome chattering got the better of us.

“We’re coming!”
cried Alfredo.

When we reached the
garage, we saw a huge truck filled to the brim with boxes of
anisette, sugar cane liquor, and cheap rum. There must have been at
least three hundred boxes. The security guard and the chauffeur were
already busy unloading them.

“But Mom, are you
crazy? Rodrigo’s still screwed up with his injury and there are
like a million boxes of liquor here. Why the hell did you buy this
junk?”

“First of all,
show your mother some respect,” said Miriam Sánchez with a stern
face. “Second, these boxes are from the mayor’s office. We’re
organizing the rally of the century. I don’t know what will happen
in the rest of Caracas, but I’m telling you that in Baruta the vote
will go to Acción Democrática
no matter what! Carlos Andrés Pérez for the people! AD will make
our day!”

The debate went on.
Meanwhile I had to laugh at the ignorance of Miriam Sánchez. The
Acción Democrática had no
chance! When it came to corruption, Lusinchi could only be outdone by
the head of their clan, Carlos Andrés Pérez, who Venezuelans had
already seen in power filling his pockets with large sums of money.
Surely, they would not re-elect the Acción
Democrática’s most notorious thief. However, in
December of 1989, history smiled down once more on populism and rum.

CHAPTER
5

July
28, 1988

It
was one of those many nights that I slept over at Manuel’s house.
We used to switch off the light and chat for a while. Sometimes we
got deep into “heavy” conversations and would talk into the early
hours without sleeping a wink.

More than just
chitchat, the heavy conversations were a kind of ritual for us, as we
would cautiously circle around topics before finally homing in on the
one that preoccupied us most, and that usually ended up provoking
uncomfortable memories and confessions that over the years cemented
our friendship. Quite often, these conversations involved the three
of us, but that evening Alfredo had gone to the movies with his
girlfriend, Maria Fernanda.

Although Manuel’s
bark was frequent and tough, he did not bite. On the contrary, he was
the most gentle and sentimental of the three of us. With the
transparency that I had often envied, and not without making a joke
of it first, he expressed his want of a vocation and his ineptitude
to me:

“I don’t have a
frigging clue what to do, Gallego. The problem is I just don’t know
what I wanna do. Look at you, dude. You pretty much got lucky with
your literature thing. And Alfredo…, well he’s a genius. He’ll
graduate and become a brain surgeon for NASA… But me, pana3,
to tell the truth, I don’t give a shit. This lawyer disguise is
just like, something to do…”

Manuel was about to
start a law degree at Universidad Santa María, a private university
that required little for candidates to be accepted. He had enrolled
without thinking it through, encouraged by the idea that the
professors there did not bore their students with philosophical
stuff: law was law; you just had to memorize it parrot-fashion and
learn a couple of clever tricks to apply it.

At least that was
what Manuel’s mom, who had also studied at Santa Maria, said about
her teachers, or rather what she quoted them as saying, imitating
them in a pompous way, as if she was talking at the Roman Forum. I
can still remember her puffing up her chest and putting on tame
animal eyes to pronounce the word “subtleties” in a stage whisper
without the final “s”, perhaps with the intention of simplifying
the question of law even more.

Miriam was delighted
that her son had chosen to follow in her footsteps, but no one had
approached his father about it. Since Mr. Sánchez had no option but
to retire, Manuel seldom mentioned him, and I think that father and
son hardly spoke. Manuel felt sorrow for Mr. Sánchez rather than
animosity, watching him deteriorate day by day.

As I was listening
to Manuel in the total darkness of the room, I imagined the
resignation etched on his face and my heart skipped a beat. My friend
was not a dramatic type; on the contrary, his true talent consisted
in his ability to laugh at his own misfortunes. At the most difficult
times of my high school life, I always went to Manuel, not so that he
could solve my problems, as he was never any good at that, but to
hear him laugh and to understand the simple way he looked at things.

Right then, I did
not even have the heart to tell him about the sense of uneasiness I
was also feeling, which might have helped him to overcome his own
discomfort. Deep down, and in an egoistic way, that night I was
hoping he would rise from his own ashes as he had done on other
occasions, spontaneously and without even noticing his own miraculous
rebirth. He did not let me down, as after a few minutes I heard him
say casually:

“My life is the
country, pana. I’m telling you, just give me a hammock, a beer, a
couple of kids messing around, my wife, and the country. Easy life.”

His frankness was a
ray of sunshine that invited me to tell him about myself.
Nevertheless, I did not feel able to talk to him about my
vulnerabilities, not out of pride, but because I did not want to
tarnish the image he had of me. Of course I liked literature, but not
as much as my friends thought; I wouldn’t lose my sanity if I had
to leave it behind. In addition, the idea of writing did not appeal
to me in the slightest, as not many could keep hunger at bay with a
few poems or books. For me, studying literature was just as
comfortable and necessary an option as law was for Manuel. I would be
a teacher with a half-decent salary and, above all, my studies
wouldn’t put financial pressure on my father. What he had to pay
for my high school had been enough, and for that reason I had decided
to study at Universidad Central de Venezuela, completely funded by
the government.

The word “vocation”
did not mean any more to me then, when I had just turned eighteen.
While others saw studying at university as a kind of lucky charm that
would help them to satisfy monetary or personal goals or both, I had
just made a short-list of the degrees I could easily study for,
without denting the family budget and without going crazy learning
about things that did not interest me and that I did not understand.
As far as university degrees went, the verb “to choose” was a
breathless bird with nowhere to fly.

However, instead of
reaching out to Manuel and telling him exactly how his words revealed
so much of myself to me and how similar we were, even when he was
surely the brave one and I the coward, I wrapped myself up in the
absolute silence and total darkness of the bedroom while he went on
talking:

“Yeah pana, I just
don’t want to complicate things. I know I have to do something; I
wouldn’t be very good at being poor. But hell, pana, medicine,
literature, no thanks. Keep it simple, pana. My thing is some simple
business that pays enough to keep me happy, without the horrible
stress that people create for themselves.”

CHAPTER
6

August
8, 1988

It
was one o’clock in the afternoon. I went to the Foreign Office to
renew my passport as Alfredo, Manuel, and I were planning to go to a
rock concert in Miami. I woke up really early and got there at 6:30
in the morning, thinking I would be first in line and could leave
that bureaucratic hellhole soon after.

Unfortunately, I did
not know about “the numbers”. Basically, you take a number and it
goes in a lottery. So no matter what time you arrived, you could be
the first or the last on the list. As the first office clerk arrived
at eight, the numbers did not go into the lottery until 9:30. I got
number twenty-three. They told us not to even consider leaving the
building: If they call you and you’re not there, you miss your
turn. If a stamp is missing, you miss your turn. If you don’t have
the right number of photos, you miss your turn. And they always tell
you off, no matter what.

Years later, I
discovered with surprise and shame how absurd it was to travel abroad
just to see a rock concert. Where I was going, to the richest country
in the world, education, and retirement meant huge expenses for the
average citizen, so that for them, leaving the United States was a
luxury, just like many of the habits that some of us Venezuelans had
adopted at that time, thanks to the oil dollars.

“Twenty-three!”
They called my number.

As I approached the
window, sticky with sweat and having wasted three precious hours, I
felt angry when I thought that Manuel and Alfredo had renewed their
passports the common Creole way. That is, from home and under the
table, fattening up the squalid salary of some foreign office
official. There I was, condemned to the tyranny of the lottery
tickets for supposedly being a good person.

“They’re
off! They all get away cleanly except for Caravaggio whose jockey had
to …”

The horse race began
just as I was handing my documents to the official at counter number
ten, a thin nervous man who, loyal to the national sport of our
people, pressed his ear against the portable radio and ordered me to
wait.

“Seventy-two
seconds, coming up to the sixth furlong and “I Love You Baby” is
still in front!”With crazed eyes and with regular
thumps on the counter, the man yelled at his radio.

“C’mon, dammit,
C’mon!”

I took advantage of
the moment to glance discreetly at his horseracing magazine and
prayed to all the saints in heaven that his favorite “Trojan”
would win the race.

That was my lucky
day.

CHAPTER
7

August
22, 1988

In
the middle of August, Manuel, Alfredo and I went to Miami to see The
Cure in concert, a rock group we worshipped.

We had planned the
trip for months thinking it would be the cherry on top of the cake of
this part of our lives. Indeed it was. None of the Miami nightclubs
that friends had recommended to us let us down, possibly because we
were drunk, although we always had the good sense to reserve a bit of
sobriety to get to the concert and back to our hotel in one piece.

We did not even see
the beaches on Miami Beach, at least not during the day, so we
returned to Caracas no more suntanned than when we had left. We also
did no sightseeing. My friends were not interested since they had
been to Miami several times and had already seen the sights. Even
though it was the first time I had set foot on Miami soil, I had no
interest in crocodile parks or rainbow parrotfish. I only wanted to
savor the delights of living without my father’s early morning
alarm call and my mother’s soups.

I experienced pure
joy, or possibly something close to nirvana as I realized that no one
cared if I did not shower or if I wore the same t-shirt day after
day. Or if I sat at a kiosk, or on the beach or just on some street
eating hamburgers full of mayo and ketchup. For me, much more than
for Alfredo or even Manuel, the trip to Miami was the craziest and
most pleasurable send-off that anyone could ever possibly give to
their adolescence.

Out of the three of
us, Alfredo had been the most prone to living in the future. While
Manuel and I did stupid things, Alfredo swayed like a sail in the
wind, leaning toward common sense or brashness depending on the
moment, without giving himself completely to anyone.

Even at the airport,
when we were about to board the plane for Miami, a maturity alarm
went off in his head and he surreptitiously went to a public
telephone booth to call his girlfriend, to whom he’d promised to
report every day. He was trying to stay loyal to his word, as keeping
Maria Fernanda happy must have been so important to him that he
patiently put up with the teasing that Manuel and I inflicted upon
him.

Our sniggering
started as soon as Alfredo turned his back and spoke into the
receiver in a sweet, hoarse whisper, searching for impossible privacy
against the wall. That sunny day, full of expectations of what we
would find in Miami, neither Manuel nor I understood a thing about
commitment, as neither of us had ever had a girlfriend. Calling Maria
Fernanda, to whom Alfredo had only said goodbye the night before,
seemed ridiculous if not totally pathetic.

Alfredo was the most
methodical and focused of the three of us. He belonged to a
well-known family in Caracas. His father, Roberto Piruggi, of Italian
descent, had studied architecture at the Universidad Central in
Caracas and had finished his studies in Italy. On his return, he
married Isabel, Alfredo’s mother, a pleasant woman from a good
Caracas family. She had recently graduated as a dentist and now
shared her time between teaching and looking after the teeth of her
very prosperous patients.

Despite his success
as an architect and his exalted social position, Roberto exuded
popular virtues. Among other things, he religiously attended a shady
domino game every Friday, about which questions were strictly
forbidden. No one knew a thing about the contestants, not even which
part of town they came from. Whether it was his character, or what he
had learned in his mysterious exploits, Roberto also had an
extraordinary ability to come to the level of the person he was
talking to, regardless of their social status, beliefs and habits.
For the colorful crowd of people that he did business with daily,
Roberto was the “soul brother” and the gutsiest of his group of
friends.

With him lived his
father, “Nonno,” who had emigrated from the south of Italy with
his wife Nina in the forties. When he had been widowed twenty-three
years before, he had no desire to his native village of Casoria near
Naples. He did not feel homesick for his native country and never
talked about his youth. The only thing he said about his father,
Alfredo’s great-grandfather, was that he had died young in a
hunting accident. Sometimes Nonno was heard talking about his mother
and younger brother, who had looked after her with great care in her
old age until she no longer wanted to go on. When he talked about
them, Nonno had the same cryptic tone that Roberto used when talking
about his domino games.

Strapping and
energetic for his seventy years, Nonno was no Joe Schmoe. He had made
his fortune in Venezuela importing wine and cheese, a pioneer rather
than an immigrant, who effectively was ahead of the whole Italian
community in immigrating a few years later. This helped him to stand
out from his fellow citizens and establish himself in the country.
Some people still remembered his generosity back in those days, but
Nonno was not one to sit down and be flattered or to reminisce about
old times. He was satisfied with himself and his family, and
submitted to the ailments of old age with more patience than he did
visits from his fellow citizens.

Despite the
annoyance caused by those speaking his language, the grandfather
oozed with pride in his native Italian countryside, its wine,
language and Neapolitan songs. He was racist in an eccentric and
impulsive way, as his era was one of “supermen” who, for better
or for worse, overcame with the fist, like Mussolini. He proclaimed
left, right, and center that men should not only be classified
according to their color and nationality, but also by their courage
and intelligence. If a man was intelligent and had “balls,” he
had the right to any skin color he chose. He did not put women into
any category, apart from those who loved gossip and intrigue. These
he classed as witches and would never call them by their first names,
even though he may have known them for fifty years. Instead, he
addressed them as “madam,” so that the witches never had an
inkling of his disdain for them. He did not want to offend them in
any way, although for him they were not real women.

“Women are like
flowers,” he used to say. “Each one gives off a different and
marvelous perfume. God gave men who are unable to smell them a
crooked nose and a miserable existence. What’s the point of life
without the fragrance exuded by women?” That is what he would tell
Manuel and me, smiling wickedly with a glint in his eye. We, mere
kids at the time, were in awe of Nonno’s wisdom. We dedicated
ourselves desperately to the sense of smell only to conclude that we
were doomed to a miserable existence, since we could detect only
three kinds of smells in a woman: the smell of onions from my mother,
the smell of vinegar from Miriam, Manuel’s mother and a delicate
floral perfume that Isabel, Alfredo’s mother would put on before
going to work.

Alfredo, the eldest
of two brothers, was the perfect result of this extraordinary
diversity represented by his parents and his grandfather. On one
hand, he was a methodical, moderate and responsible individual with a
great sense of morality. He could apply himself passionately to any
discipline, whether it was sports, studies or strange hobbies, such
as dissecting animals, a pastime that occupied him for a long period.
On the other hand, Alfredo was lazy, mischievous and drunken, fond of
playing jokes and, despite his extensive vocabulary and quite good
manners, could be extremely vulgar.

Unlike the Sánchez
family, the Piruggis were not flamboyant. For them, money was more
like a custom that had grown as solid over the years as the virtues
and weaknesses that everyone possessed, but was no big deal.

I loved going to
visit them, as they were a pleasant group that got along well
together, very similar to my own family, or how my family could have
been if it was not for the obsessive hierarchal system that beset us.
We were divided by the idea that debating was my father’s
privilege, overseeing the household was my mother’s task, and that
my sister and I had different responsibilities which corresponded to
our gender. However, in Alfredo’s family, where everyone had
complete freedom to follow their own inclinations, no one used rank
to instill respect. The adults in the Piruggi family managed to tame
their children and the friends of their children effortlessly.

“How are you,
sweetheart? I dreamed about you again last night, honey. My princess,
as soon as I get back to Caracas I have a cuddly toy to give you…”

Once at the hotel,
Alfredo talked at length with Maria Fernanda on the phone again,
armed with a handful of sweet nothings while Manuel and I watched a
movie. Alfredo’s relationship with his girlfriend did not bother us
in the slightest; quite the opposite, we took it as a challenge to
our linguistic wit:

“Ridiculous, she’s
got him under her thumb, he’s her slave, a lapdog….” The names
rained down on our friend even in front of Maria Fernanda who found
it amusing, passing them off with childish gestures. For her, Manuel
and I were jesters in a court where she was of course the queen, and
Alfredo her consort.

Getting on well with
Maria Fernanda who was from real Caracas high society had advantages
we could not ignore. For as long as her fragile teenage relationship
with Alfredo lasted, Manuel and I would get into the best parties at
the Caracas Country Club and even occasional brunches with dozens of
impatient rich girls desperate to let their hair down.

As Alfredo was still
on the phone, Manuel stopped the film to tell me:

“Pana, as soon as
we get back, we have to meet up with Mafe’s friends.”

It took me a while
to reply as I was distracted by the sudden disappearance of Sharon
Stone’s legs from the screen.

“Shit, chamo” I
said, taking the remote control away from him and switching the TV
back on. “Don’t you think it sucks how those snobby girls
introduce themselves, reeling off their two hundred names as if
they’re saying the rosary?”